The Official Report is a written record of public meetings of the Parliament and committees.
The Official Report search offers lots of different ways to find the information you’re looking for. The search is used as a professional tool by researchers and third-party organisations. It is also used by members of the public who may have less parliamentary awareness. This means it needs to provide the ability to run complex searches, and the ability to browse reports or perform a simple keyword search.
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
Depending on the kind of search you want to do, one of these views will be the best option. The default view is to show the report for each meeting of Parliament or a committee. For a simple keyword search, the results will be shown by item of business.
When you choose to search by a particular MSP, the results returned will show each spoken contribution in Parliament or a committee, ordered by date with the most recent contributions first. This will usually return a lot of results, but you can refine your search by keyword, date and/or by meeting (committee or Chamber business).
We’ve chosen to display the entirety of each MSP’s contribution in the search results. This is intended to reduce the number of times that users need to click into an actual report to get the information that they’re looking for, but in some cases it can lead to very short contributions (“Yes.”) or very long ones (Ministerial statements, for example.) We’ll keep this under review and get feedback from users on whether this approach best meets their needs.
There are two types of keyword search:
If you select an MSP’s name from the dropdown menu, and add a phrase in quotation marks to the keyword field, then the search will return only examples of when the MSP said those exact words. You can further refine this search by adding a date range or selecting a particular committee or Meeting of the Parliament.
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
There are two ways of searching by date.
You can either use the Start date and End date options to run a search across a particular date range. For example, you may know that a particular subject was discussed at some point in the last few weeks and choose a date range to reflect that.
Alternatively, you can use one of the pre-defined date ranges under “Select a time period”. These are:
If you search by an individual session, the list of MSPs and committees will automatically update to show only the MSPs and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of MSPs and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of MSPs and committees will update to show the information that was current at that time.
All Official Reports of meetings in the Debating Chamber of the Scottish Parliament.
All Official Reports of public meetings of committees.
Displaying 3298 contributions
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Richard Leonard
We are really out of time, but I will make one final request. Could you supply to the committee in writing a list of the private debt collection agencies that operate in Scotland?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Richard Leonard
For the avoidance of confusion, are you going to get, or are you now getting, regional level data about Scottish income tax receipts?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Richard Leonard
Again, for the avoidance of doubt, have those discussions recommenced? You said that they are going to. Is that a future or a present description?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Richard Leonard
Before Jonathan Athow does that, I will ask you a question. You said that the Scottish Government is in favour of a mixed economy, but it does not have a mixed economy in relation to the recovery of overpayments of social security, for example. It has a very clear policy that any overpayments through Social Security Scotland are recovered by in-house teams. That is not outsourced to private debt agencies, so why is this different?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Richard Leonard
Okay. Thank you.
The other thing that you mentioned, which is of interest to not only the Public Audit Committee but the Parliament as a whole, is the fiscal framework and how that works. Of course, it works in a very particular way. If Scottish income tax receipts are at a certain level compared with UK income tax receipts, there are consequential effects on the operation of the fiscal framework, which can be advantageous but can also be disadvantageous. Can you update us on where the renegotiation of the fiscal framework is?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Richard Leonard
Thank you very much.
The committee is aware that, in places, the reports prepared by the National Audit Office and the Auditor General for Scotland used language such as “continuing limitations” and “risk”, and identified some areas of concern. We will get to those shortly but, before we get into some of that detail, I will take you back to one of the fundamental issues raised in the audit.
The issue came out in the evidence session that we had on 9 February with the National Audit Office and the Auditor General. They drew our attention to the conclusion that the growth in Scottish income tax receipts in the financial year 2021-22 was expected to be 11.3 per cent, whereas the UK equivalent income tax receipts were expected to grow by 13.2 per cent. I turn to Alyson Stafford first. Can you give us an explanation of the Government’s thinking on why Scottish income tax growth has been lower than the growth in the UK as a whole in recent years?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Richard Leonard
Good morning. I welcome everybody to the 14th meeting in 2023 of the Public Audit Committee. We have received apologies from Colin Beattie. I welcome Bill Kidd, who is substituting for him today.
The first item on our agenda is to decide whether to take agenda items 3 and 4 in private. Are we agreed to do so?
Members indicated agreement.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Richard Leonard
Thank you very much.
As you have suggested, those are very much the kind of areas that we want to probe, question and better understand. However, before we get to questions, I invite Jonathan Athow to give us an opening statement.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Richard Leonard
We are a bit pressed for time, so we will move on to another area that has been of special interest to the committee. Craig Hoy will ask about that.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 11 May 2023
Richard Leonard
We have a couple of minutes left. Jonathan Athow, if you want to add to that, please feel free to do so.